Marginalia
MARGINALIA: Drawings by Tiago Estrada
at Rooster Gallery Contemporary Art, New York
The title “Marginalia” finds its genesis in the medieval Latin expression marginalis, or the act of hand-writing short notes in book margins.
Estrada’s introspective and somehow sub- versive artistic process is deeply rooted in 20th century philosophy and psychiatry, and his drawings are therefore marginal from an artistic and sociological point of view.
Michel Foucault’s statement – “We are prisoners of our own language” – provides the viewer the answer to Estrada’s drawings, since he has been collecting and analyzing his own isms and “schizophrenic” doodling/writing behaviors for the past ten years. In fact, everybody exhibits these sorts of behaviors, since language and written words have a limited nature.
Just as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari distanced themselves from linear thought in their milestone oeuvre “Capitalism and Schizophrenia,” so does Estrada with his drawings by rejecting the traditional linear process in the arts.
“Marginalia: Drawings by Tiago Estrada” is, therefore, not only an exhibition but also a physiological diary about drawing repetition. The artist Ìs rejection of writing emphasizes the formal arrangements of handwriting itself, almost like a copyist monk, translating without knowing the original document language.
Tiago Estrada was born in Braga, Portugal, majored in painting at the School of Fine Arts of Oporto, earned an MFA in Painting at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is represented in MoMA Archives and in Drawing Center’s Digital Archive Online, among other collections.